28 JULY 2007, Page 16

After all the television fakeries, I am even beginning to doubt that Roland Rat was real

HUGO RIFKIND There was a photograph in one of the Sunday papers, and it caught my eye. It showed a cheery bald man in some drowned Gloucestershire village traversing the floodwater on a penny-farthing. Hmm, I thought to myself, almost immediately, I bet that's faked.

I should be careful here. The kind of man who would ride baldly and cheerily through floodwater on a penny-farthing is the kind of man, I suspect, who would fire off a wronged and angry letter to a newspaper at the merest drop of a (doubtless jaunty, perhaps themed) hat. So, to be clear, I am suggesting no impropriety. I am merely suggesting that, perhaps, the situation was not quite what this photograph suggested. Perhaps there was some collaboration at work here. Perhaps, across flooded Gloucestershire villages, staunch men are not really getting around on penny-farthings Perhaps, in two feet of muddy water, it isn't a particularly sensible way of getting from A to B. Perhaps, perhaps.

Weeks on, media fakery remains big news. Was this photograph, I asked myself, misleading the public? Was it tantamount to showing the Queen backwards, or depicting somebody not quite meeting Gordon Brown for the second time when they were actually not quite meeting him for the first? If it is a bad thing to cajole a viewer into entering a competition they have no chance of winning, surely it is a worse thing to convince a reader that all Jesus really needed to cross the Sea of Galilee was one wheel bigger than the other, a keen sense of balance, and not to be frightened of looking a touch clownish.

Most recently, we have the scandal of Bear Grylls, who does not, it turns out, do nearly as many things in the woods as legend holds a bear ought. Grylls is the star of Born Survivor, which purportedly sees him dumped in perilous geographical locations and left to fend for himself, without food, shelter or penny-farthings to fall back upon. In reality, allegedly, Grylls has been sleeping in motels and once had help building a raft. In one episode, he charmed a herd of wild horses, which, apparently, weren't all that wild.

There is worse to come, I am sure of it. When politicians appear on news programmes, standing in front of the Westminster skyline, I have a theory that they are not, in fact, on wobbly platforms strapped to the side of buildings. Seriously.

My hunch is that they might be in studios, in front of blank green screens. We are being deceived. And, what is worse, I think this sort of thing has been going on for years. It is endemic in our broadcasting culture. I might get laughed at for this one, but I'm not convinced that Roland Rat was ever, actually, a rat at all.

How far are we going to let this run? Everybody knows that artifice and presentation go hand in hand. The real deception of the public in all this isn't the work of TV producers. It is the work of everybody else, the people who make a fuss, as though they didn't always know. We are like dirty old men, picked up with hookers who turn out to be as young as they look. 'How was I to know?' we protest, buttoning our flies. 'She said she was over 18!'

Come off it. What a chorus of hypocrisy. The worst offenders are the TV people themselves, the older ones. 'Poor training!' they sigh, piously. 'Casual workers! Commercial pressures! No ethos of responsibility!' Yes, but their telly is a lot better than yours was, isn't it? These unpaid and underpaid drones — who bounce miserably from contract to contract because old frauds like you skew the whole industry by spending 30,000 licence fees a year on Jonathan Ross — you think they'd get away with that LWT-style crap today? Contemporary quizzes may sometimes be faked, but at least they aren't universally dismal. For a whole generation, the highlight of Saturday night was watching a robot dustbin make a sad, wow-wow-wow noise. And this was a golden age?

Truth in presentation is a flexible thing. I'd rather see Bear Grylls in a smooth, informative effort that lies to me around the edges than I would in a messy, scrappy thing, which ends halfway through because he runs out of weevils and eats the cameraman. Much television, even if it purports to be documentary, functions as entertainment.

Much news reporting (whisper it) does, too. There is a line where deception stops being helpful and benign, and becomes exactly the opposite. That chap on the penny-farthing, however he got there, is on the right side of it. The Queen storming out of a photoshoot before it starts is not. If we pretend that the line doesn't exist at all, then neither are we.

Drugs now. Cannabis. The drug that half the Cabinet, apparently, are so sad, yet obviously also so proud, to have 'dabbled' with, as students. To 'dabble', it seems, is to try something, perhaps repeatedly, but without enjoying it. Is there a causal link, do you think, between not enjoying cannabis and ending up as a Cabinet minister? In po-faced student politics, the soggy, neglected spliff could become a symbol of aspiration. Take a drag, look unimpressed, get elected as president of the Oxford Union.

The idea that the use and possession of cannabis should be penalised rests on a fairly simple argument. It is, bluntly, that while using and smoking dope may not be particularly evil, it is bad for you, particularly if you are young. If we agree that it must be discouraged, an unlucky few end up as collateral damage Charged, convicted, pour encourages les autres. Agree with it or not, this is the theory. So, if our politicians must trot out their drug histories, how about a little honesty?

'Yes,' one of them could say, 'I smoked cannabis. And I didn't just "dabble", either. I got stoned. Golly, yes. Stoned off my nut. I had that falling sensation between my ears, I developed an insatiable craving for cheese, and I woke up in the wrong house, wearing a shoe I had never seen before in my life. In fact, I did it quite a lot. But then I realised I was getting boring, smelly and weird, and utterly wasting my life. So I stopped, before I turned into a gurning baglady, or got nicked. You should, too.' Would that be so hard?